Background Articles

Alaska is experiencing rapid environmental changes, including record-high temperatures, shrinking sea ice, increased wildfires, and unusual wildlife patterns, such as the decline of salmon and the rise of snow goose populations.

Alaska's seafood industry is facing significant challenges due to climate change, geopolitical factors, and economic pressures. Efforts to address these issues are underway, but solutions are complex and require substantial investment and policy change.

The Northeast, which has warmed faster than the rest of the country, saw the biggest jump in mosquito days. Look up how mosquito season has changed in your town.

An Anchorage beekeeper has learned how to help his honeybee colonies survive to see spring, and he’s teaching others to do the same.

In Southeast Alaska, and across the state, climate change is bringing more rainfall, less winter snowfall and hotter temperatures. According to the project’s lead researcher Alex McCarrel, those changes disrupt berry development because a berry plant’s life cycle is precisely tuned to its environment.

As Alaskan permafrost warms, hibernating arctic ground squirrels generate less heat, causing females to emerge from hibernation up to 10 days before their male counterparts – a mismatch that could have large, cascading ecological impacts. While reduced thermogenesis due to warming temperatures could allow the squirrels to conserve energy and, thus, increase winter survival, a shortened hibernation season could also increase the exposure of the animals to hungry predators, altering mortality rates, particularly for earlier emerging female squirrels. The phenological mismatch between the sexes may also disrupt reproductive rates. And over longer time scales, continued warming in the Arctic may lead to changes in male squirrel seasonal behaviors, say the authors.

“Warmer and wetter winters shorten the winter season and prolong the growing season, which give rise to new opportunities. Among other things, this includes higher annual yield with several harvests, along with the possibility to grow new, more productive crop varieties and species,” says Dr Sigridur Dalmannsdottir at NIBIO.

Climate change is affecting all aspects of our land, and also what flies in our sky. Bird migration is changing as average temperatures rise. So what does that mean for our bird species?

The number of dogs testing positive for tick-borne illnesses has nearly doubled this year, says a Nova Scotia veterinarian. Jeff Goodall, the owner and a veterinarian at Sunnyview Animal Care, said the problems go beyond Lyme disease. Anaplasmosis is also a concern. He said dogs have been testing positive for tick-borne illnesses throughout the winter.

Drivers in much of Alaska including Anchorage will have until May 15 to remove studded tires; those in southern areas will have until May 1.

Climate change has been observed for hundreds of years by the plant specialists of three Odawa Tribes in the Upper Great Lakes along Lake Michigan. Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is the focus of two National Park Service (NPS) studies of Odawa Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of plants, ecosystems, and climate change. Data collected during these studies contributed to developing Plant Gathering Agreements between tribes and parks. This analysis derived from 95 ethnographic interviews conducted by University of Arizona (UofA) anthropologists in partnership with tribal appointed representatives. Odawa people recognized in the park 288 plants and five habitats of traditional and contemporary concern. Tribal representatives explained that 115 of these traditional plants and all five habitats are known from multigenerational eyewitness accounts to have been impacted by climate change. The TEK study thus represents what Native people know about the environment. These research findings are neither intended to test their TEK nor the findings of Western science.

Warming soils beneath Utqiagvik are triggering erosion that threatens homes, infrastructure and cultural resources. The North Slope has seen some of the fastest changes in coastal erosion in the nation.

Researchers have detected striking changes in narwhal migration times driven by climate changes in the North. "Our long-term dataset identified that passage boundary crossing dates were associated with changing sea ice dynamics as a result of climate change," the researchers said in their paper p

Warmer winters and thicker layers of insulating snow are spurring creation of more taliks, sections of ground that doesn’t freeze even in winter.

By late November and into early December, they head into their dens for hibernation — but not all of them. About 30% of the Kodiak male bear population don’t den at all, according to a state biologist.

Two hundred years ago this month, some Englishmen far from home were struggling for survival in the Northwest Territories’ barrenlands. Now, Yellowknife’s main street is named for the man in charge. Chief Edward Sangris of the Yellowknives Dene community of Dettah, across the bay from Yellowknife, said he and many other community members have no attachment to Franklin and the colonial history he represents.

Seal meat makes up a good portion of what’s in subsistence hunters’ freezers in Kotzebue. But the sea ice the seals haul out on is diminishing, and new research shows that's shortening the window to hunt seals.

The number of animals in the Western Arctic Caribou Herd (WACH) is down by 20 percent. The calving parturition average was also significantly lower than recent years, with 2020 at 67%.

The region is prime landslide territory and a changing climate - trending toward warmer, rainier winters - is likely to increase the frequency of slides in the future.

Winters are getting shorter and summers are getting longer, a new comparison shows. In most regions of the U.S. and Canada, summer is about 6-10% longer and winter is about 7-11% shorter. In Alaska, winters are about 30% shorter than they were just a lifetime ago.